Where did all the real Democrats go?

[INdemo]

The liberal Democrats......where or why did they ever get the idea that a honest to goodness progressive cannot get elected unless they "move to the center"...So if a Republican candidate "moves to the center" to get elected and we have a Democrat "moves to the center" is there a difference?
Could this be the problem with having a watered down healthcare reform with all these Republican lites voting on the legislation?
If we had a honest to goodness Democratic Majority could we have had real healthcare reform passed and signed by now??..
Corporate Democrats,or Republican lites..or whatever you want to call them, I just wish we had a real Majority of progressive Democrats or Democrats that aren't ashamed of being called a liberal.Than perhaps we would not have to worry about losing the Majority in 2010.

[orpupilofnature57]

1. Unfortunately here.

http://www.worldofstock.com/closeups/MES2467.php

[Lorien]

2. The DLC was created by the GOP to destroy the Democrats from within

and it worked. The "Center" is now the hard Right. They've been working hard to shift the Center since Reagan's first term. That worked too. They've been pushing hard to demonize the word "Liberal" since 1980 as well, and convince us all that any news reporting without a hard Right slant is part of the "State controlled Liberal media". All overwhelming successes. Liberals haven't become Republicans. They still exist, but they exist in the mainstream of society, and as a handful of congress people. They don't have the massive corporate backing that the Far Right has, so we'll continue to be marginalized Until we treat the illness by having true election reform and reinstating the fairness Doctrine. Until then the symptoms-an increasingly Far Right government that doesn't give a crap about American citizens and only serves the uber rich- will continue to multiply.

[orpupilofnature57]

3. Republican-lite your right.

[Individualist]

7. Exactly. DLC is the elephant in the room.

[Le Taz Hot]

8. Actually, the DLC was created

by the Clinton team to combat the huge amounts of money the Republicans were able to raise all throughout the 80's and 90's. Most of the money was pro-business, corporate donations and they were outraising the Democrats by something like 3:1. This was all part of Clinton's triangulating strategy -- basically to opt Republican tactics to win. Remember, with this group winning is everything. The end result is a two-party system representing the elite monied interests. They completely abandoned traditional Democratic policy and principle in order to win. As a result, we got NAFTA, the Communications Act, bombed the shit out of Iraq for 8 years, and wholly-owned corporate sponsorship of the Democratic Party.

The GOP didn't create the DLC, faux Democrats created it. If you want to look for the enemy, search your own party.

[Greyhound]

19. It was founded in 1985 by a cabal of southern DINOs intent on taking back the Democratic Party

from the damn "libruls".

[Le Taz Hot]

22. Enter the Clinton team.

Remember, Clinton et al had their eyes set on the WH waaaayyyy before 1992.

[TorchTheWitch]

11. It was created by sell-out, run-to-the-right DEMS

Founding and early history:

The DLC was founded by Al From in 1985 in the wake of incumbent President Ronald Reagan's defeat of Walter Mondale in the 1984 presidential election. Other founders include Democratic Governors Chuck Robb (Virginia), Bruce Babbitt (Arizona) and Lawton Chiles (Florida), Senator Sam Nunn (Georgia) and Representative Dick Gephardt (Missouri).<3>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_Leadership_Council

[bvar22]

23. !

The DLC New Team
Progressives Need NOT Apply

(Screen Capped from the DLC Website)

[Go2Peace]

24. The Democratic Leadership Council is modernizing the progressive tradition in American politics by a

"The Democratic Leadership Council is modernizing the progressive tradition in American politics by advancing a set of innovative ideas for governing through ..."

This comes up in a google search. It is in their meta-tag description. So now they are trying to steal the term "progressive"? Isn't that a little orwellian?

[Greyhound]

27. Whenever liberals and progressives make headway in the national conscience

they will invariably jump in and try to steal it. They are literally anti-liberal fascists and they are running the party.

[geek tragedy]

4. The problem is that Congress has a conservative working majority.

Legislation will generally be only as liberal as the 218th most liberal member of the House and somewhere between the 51st and 60th most liberal Senator.

[L0oniX]

14. The other problem is that the majority of them are millionaires.

They only care about their millionaire corporate friends.

[geek tragedy]

15. I'll take a rich Alan Grayson over a middle class Heath Shuler. nt

[Armstead]

5. They either became cowardly and/or corrupt

They cowardly ones say "I agree it owuld be really good if we passed xxxxx, but we can;t because the nation is too conservative."

The corrupt ones say "No, that's too radical. We just need task the corporations and oligarchs to be nice, and they'll do the right thing....By the way, after I leave office, I'm going to work for a big corporate lobbying firm or get a job on Wall Street."

The two varieties thus promote the narrow view that we have to be Republican right.

BTW, I'm not talking about drastic changes. Anything meaningful, even things that are mainstream and moderate are avoided these days.

With the current crop of leadership, we would never have gotten anything done in the past, and we'd still be living in the pre-reform Gilded Age. (Now we're just in a Neo-Gildd Age with some remaining protections.)

[Libertas1776]

6. A la Pete Seeger...

Where have all the "Democrats" gone?
Long time passing
Where have all the "Democrats" gone?
Long time ago
Where have all the "Democrats" gone?
Gone to graveyards every one
When will they ever learn?
When will they ever learn?

[jpak]

9. More Dem-destroying liberal-third-party agitprop bullshit

:thumbsdown:

[villager]

13. as an example of someone who's been bamboozled into demonizing the word "liberal..."

n/t

[niceypoo]

10. The Democrats suffer from battered wife syndrome

...the GOP being the husband. Occasionally the wife tries to assert herself, only to be shouted down and beaten by the husband. The Democrats are timid and submissive to the GOP.

[branders seine]

12. when the neocons took over the republican party after Watergate,

they also established movements like the DLC to take over the Democratic Party and move it to the right. With a succession of republican-lites-in-Democratic-clothing, they have successfully marginalized liberals and have implanted the memes that "far right ideology is 'centrist'" and "Democrats must run to the 'center' in order to win" (also known as Clintonian triangulation). They know that most Americans can't tell the difference between a label and the actual stuff inside the package, so if they label something "Democratic," millions of Democrats will automatically support it, even when that label is entirely misleading.

[Greyhound]

18. Like the "Socialist" Nazis and "Communist" Russians. n/t

[ProgressOnTheMove]

16. I think we need a mad as hell not going to take it anymore progressive womans congress at the moment

Certainly not like Bachmann but intelligent and determined kind to get things back on track. Hartmann always says it's the solution to climate change and many other issues I'd love to see that theory in work.

[cali]

17. In some states and districts, an honest to goodness progressive consistantly gets

elected. But anyone who thinks that any of my reps could be elected in Missouri or Nebraska is delusional.

[JanMichael]

20. They were bought by corporations. nt.

[OhioChick]

25. Bingo! n/t

[unkachuck]

26. yep....n/t

[Kaleva]

21. Where'd they get the idea? From election results.